Real Estate Trends – Brookline, Massachusetts #2

Introduction:

Welcome back again for our latest real estate market trend report. For those of you that are here for the first time what we do in these reports is examine the real estate market in a city or town in Massachusetts or New Hampshire to evaluate the current conditions. We do this by looking at the changes in three key metrics year over year for the municipality to see how the market has changed and then evaluate what those observations might mean for that market moving forward.

Market Trends in Brookline, MA – May 2015 and 2016:

The Brookline, MA market has fallen off since last year. The average prices are down and the median prices were down as well. The days on market were down quite a bit though. Inventory was up a small amount with 14 sales in May of 2015 all the way up to 16 in May 2016.

Average Listing Prices:

We will first start off by looking at the average listing price. In Brookline, MA the average listing price in May 2015 was $2,167,921. This was down to $1,810,312 in May 2016. This gives a very sizable decrease of 16.50% year over year.

Looking at the median prices we see that they were lower in both years. For May of 2015 the median listing price for Brookline, MA was $1,924,500 and in May 2016 it was $1,699,000 which now gives a somewhat smaller decrease of 11.72%.

Average Sale Prices:

The next thing we will be looking at is the average sale prices. The average sale price for in Brookline, MA in May of 2015 was $2,138,446 and in May 2016 that was down to $1,804,938. That gives another sizable decrease of 15.60%, but a little smaller than the average list price.

We see the same pattern that we did for the median list price. For May of 2015 the median sales price for Brookline, MA was $1,902,500 and in May 2016 it was $1,679,250 giving another large decrease of 11.73%, and almost exactly the same as the median list price.

Prices have declined a bit for Brookline, MA in May. The range was not that large going from just under 12% to 16.5%. The averages were both on the high end of the range while the medians were on the lower side. Since medians are considered the best method to use for real estate pricing analysis we are going to give them more weight and say that prices are down the 11.7% or so that both those numbers showed vs. the 15+% seen with the average numbers.

Average Days on Market:

Finally the last metric we look at are the average days on market, which is the measure of how long it takes for a property to sell in the current market. For Brookline, MA the average days on market in May of 2015 were 80.79 and the average days on market for May 2016 were 40.50 for a pretty large 49.87% decrease.

Brookline, Massachusetts Summary:

The Brookline, Massachusetts real estate market is down a bit since last year. The average prices were down quite a bit while the median prices were down almost as much. The days on market were down a lot however. While a little surprising and a very nice counterargument to a down market, ultimately being able to sell a house roughly 5 weeks faster does not really start to counteract 6 digit price declines.

In summary if you are looking to sell a house in Brookline, MA now you should expect to get less for it than you would have gotten last year. However you could also expect it to take a lot less time to sell compared to last year as well.